Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation brings together studies of the transpacific—especially as a site of colonization, military empire, and racialized subject formation—with studies of sensorial racial ecologies—especially as inflected by new materialisms and ecocriticisms. I read contemporary literature and photographic archives to examine the ways US and Spanish empires materially and discursively attempt to produce docile colonial subjects and also how they fail to do so. The Vietnamese refugee, Filipinx American, and Chicanx subjects I attend to are prescribed differing, racialized conditions of bodily entrapment and extractability; rendered as malleable and ultimately expendable other-than-human objects, they are deployed to support imperial projects in the Pacific and its landed edges. However, as my readings disclose, these subjects respond to attempted subjugation by imagining vibrant ways of feeling and thinking the world. I theorize what I term vibrant being, which becomes sensible to us if we attune ourselves to the physical properties of light, sound, and oceanic waves that are evoked by the works I examine. Forged in the vertigoes of geographic displacements and through contact with the unwieldy, dissolving material of the ocean, vibrant being signals a reorientation of the senses and kinesthetic body. I explore vibrant being as a mode of racialized ontology that becomes accessible to readers and viewers who attune themselves to the sensorial and affective valences of transpacific living. I show how attending to vibrant being opens up ways of sensing anew and experiencing expansive, ecological forms of relation. I theorize vibrancy not only as a way of thinking/feeling the world but also develop vibrancy as a reading methodology via my own close and creative attentions to texts.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2024
Citation
Lafferty, Olivia Anne,
"Transpacific Vibrancy: Listening across Asian American and Chicanx Texts"
(2024).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:9fh2cusg/
